Your Gods who Brought You Up?
In Exodus 32:4, Aaron makes a golden calf and says, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” I use the Jewish Tanakh translation here. Nearly all other translations say, “These are your gods…” (the NKJV and NAS are rare exceptions). The statement begins with a plural pronoun (elleh) followed by the word “elohim” which is in a second person singular construct. Why the differences in translation?
First, we notice that Aaron only made one golden calf, yet we have the plural pronoun. This is very strange. One commentator says, “There is as yet no satisfactory explanation for this anomaly” (Sarna, Exodus, 204). He notices, however, that in the parallel in Nehemiah 9:18 that the singular pronoun (zeh) is used. In other words, an inspired commentary tells us it should be translated as a singular. My view follows The Commentators Bible that Exodus is using a plural of majesty, a kind of nosism which emphasizes the object in a stylistic way, such as when some individual refers to himself as “we,” like when Queen Victoria, upon hearing a tasteless joke, is said to have replied, “We are not amused.” (I actually did this same thing at the beginning of this very paragraph!) Thus, “This is your god” is the better translation.
Second, the word “elohim” is itself a plural noun in form, like our “sheep” or “deer.” The only way you can tell how many there are, is by context. In this case, there is only one calf, so it seems best to translate it as singular, again, just as Nehemiah does in his reflection on this verse. But is it another god or is it God? The very next verse answers. He says, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to Yahweh” (Ex 32:5). Clearly, Aaron is not worshiping another god. He’s not that dumb, especially after all the LORD has done for Israel at the Exodus event.
There is another passage found much later on in 1 Kings which repeats Aaron’s statement identically, save for the pronoun, which is replaced by the interjection, “Behold!” King Jeroboam creates not one but two golden calves and says, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!” (1Kg 12:28). The Tanakh is now the only English translation I’m aware of that translates it as the singular, “your God” (although even it uses the lower case “g”), even though it is exactly the same Hebrew as what Aaron used.
On the surface, this makes sense. After all, there are now two of them. But besides the fact that the Hebrew is identical to that of Aaron and so Jeroboam is clearly intending the exact same meaning, we need to understand something else. That is, the nature of an idol. Modern Christians badly misunderstand what idols are. This stems from our incredulity that there actually are other actual entities that the Bible calls “gods.” The First Commandment is, “You shall have no other gods (elohim) before me.”
We tend to think that these “gods” (put in scare-quotes) are idols, things that we put in place of God in our lives such as sports, sex, food, clothes, etc. But elohim are not idols. They are, as the LXX of Psalm 96:5 calls them, “demons.” (In this sense, not an unclean spirit of the NT, but a creature that “knows” something, or is to be “feared” or controls the “fate” of a non-believer, as the various etymologies of demon suggest.) This makes some people extremely uncomfortable. But this is precisely why we differentiate in modern English between God and gods. There is only one uncreated, all-powerful, all-knowing, etc. Being. We call him God. But there are other gods that are real, such as Satan, who is called “the god of this world” (2Cor 4:4). Hence, the Apostle says, “Indeed, there are many gods and many lords” (1Cor 8:5). Though they bear the same title: elohim, these elohim are not of the same nature, for elohim isn’t a word that even describes nature, but rather place of residence (all elohim reside in the spiritual realm).
Someone will say, “But doesn’t that very Psalm say, ‘For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols?’” The answer is that’s what English translations like the ESV say. But the Hebrew actually simply says they are elilim. A much better translation is simply, “worthless” or “vain” or “insignificant” or “empty,” like Job says of his “worthless” (elilim) counselors (Job 13:4). The LXX translators knew this, which is why they translate it not as “idol” (pesel, ala the Second Commandment), but demon.
Technically, an idol was conceived of much like a house. It would become the residence in which the deity would be caused to reside through an incantation. Think about it. If the pagans had 100 different statues of Zeus set up in 100 temples in Rome, they would not think that there are 100 Zeus’. Rather, this would be the place where Zeus’ worship would be formalized. And that happened in many places.
In this case, it is even more specific. As Robert Alter says, “The golden icon was conceived as the terrestrial throne or platform for the deity (singular or plural), having precisely the same function as the cherubim over the Ark. The Golden Calf is thus a kind of anti-Tabernacle or anti-Ark, meant for the same end of making the divine dwell among the people but doing it in a prohibited fashion. It should be noted that golden bulls or calves were often used as cultic seats for deities in the ancient Near East” (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: Ex 32:4). This is what Jeroboam is doing then. He is creating two different seats upon which he will have Yahweh sit in his northern kingdom. These are the cities of Bethel (in the far south) and Dan in the far north.
The first step to perverting worship is always to taint the pure worship of the True God. God gets to decide where he resides in his special presence, not man. And God in the OT decided it would only be in the temple in Jerusalem. This was the original perversion--not the "who" but the "where" and "how." We’ll make God reside where we want him to reside. That’s manipulating the Deity. Only after this is done, as we become comfortable manipulating God, will worshiping false gods become acceptable to a people.
This is why we should translate in both instances, “This is your God, O Israel, who brought you out of the Land of Egypt.” And we shouldn’t be shy about doing so. A great many things, as we have seen here, are at stake in this translation.
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